Long Long Way
by attackfishscales
Summary: The ferry to Ba Sing Se isn't a place so much as a place between places. Maybe that's why Katara takes a chance and reaches out to a boy and his uncle.


**Author's Note:** Written for Tumblr user bunny-loverxiv as a reward for donating eighteen dollars to HIAS, a charity that aids immigrants and refugees coming to the US and are fighting Trump's crimes against humanity. She wanted a Jet Katara role swap.

* * *

Long Long Way

It was the lost ones that always drew Katara in, the ones that wore their heartache and desolation on the outside for everybody to see. He stood there staring out over the water, anger and desperation rolling off him like waves, and Katara couldn't help herself. "You're not alone."

He turned to her, the one eye she could see narrowed down into a slit. "What?"

"You're not alone," she repeated. "We're all sick of living like this. My name's Katara. These two are Longshot and Smellerbee."

"Hey," Smellerbee grunted, while Longshot just nodded.

"Hello," the boy said unenthusiastically.

"I thought it would get better in Ba Sing Se, where no one had to deal with the war, but this boat ride isn't giving me high hopes," Katara told him. "But Smellerbee did a little bit of scouting, and she found something out."

"The ferry captain's got real food." Smellerbee grinned. It was infectious. Katara found her own lips quirking up to match. "He's eating like a king while we're stuck with this rotten trash."

"What sort of king is he eating like?" the old man with the boy asked.

Smellerbee's grin widened. "The fat, happy kind."

"You want to help us get that food to the people who really need it?" Katara asked.

He turned all the way around to face her. Katara refused to let herself show any kind of reaction when the scar came into view, dark and wrinkled, twisting the whole of one side of his face. "Yeah, okay," he said, and his voice was so normal, soft and cranky, like so many other kids she knew, that it brought her back to reality, letting her ground herself. She wondered how long it would take to get used to a face like that.

o0O0o

He wasn't any less sullen after their triumph. As he ate his share of the bounty, his mouth stayed pulled down in a petulant little frown.

Truth was, Katara didn't feel much better. "Back home, I heard people eat like this every night in Ba Sing Se, but I'm not sure I believe that. People don't hoard food like that if there's lots of it to go around."

"Ba Sing Se truly is magnificent," the old man said. "But where there is magnificence, there are nearly always people on the bottom, making it happen who don't get to share in it."

"Yeah." Katara worried her lip with her teeth. "Hey you sound like you've seen Ba Sing Se before."

"Only the great outer wall, a long time ago, when I was a different man."

"Your son never told us your names," she said.

"He's my uncle, not my dad."

"I'm Mushi," the old man said, shooting a warning look at his nephew. "And the crabby one is Li."

Li scowled at his uncle.

"And you said your names were Katara, Longshot and Smellerbee?"

Katara nodded. "You have a good memory."

"I try to keep sharp," he said with a smile. "So, Smellerbee. That's an unusual name for a young man."

"Maybe it's because I'm not a man. I'm a girl!" She stormed off, jaw clenched. Katara winced.

Mushi tried at least. He called out to her, "Oh, now I see. It's a beautiful name for a lovely girl!"

Katara watched her friend go to Longshot before turning back to Mushi and Li. "She picked it herself."

"What..."

"Her name," she explained. She picked it herself. We all did, after the Fire Nation army invaded our village and our parents were killed, and we had to flee into the forest. Longshot's the best archer we ever ran across, I stole these out of the Fire Nation commander who moved into the nicest house in the village." She pulled out her to kataras and showed them off. "And Smellerbee's the best honey finder. Once a butter-bee flew up her nose and stung her, and she's been Smellerbee ever since."

She wasn't sure she liked the way Old Man Mushi was looking at her kataras, with something dark, secretive and unhappy in his eyes. "Then it's the perfect name for her."

She slid her kataras back into their sheaths at her belt. "I always thought so."

"I should apologise to her," he said with a sigh. "I am going to Ba Sing Se for a second chance you know, my nephew too, but no matter how hard I try to reach him, I keep saying the wrong things."

Whatever she had seen when he looked at her kataras was gone. He just looked tired. Tired, and old, with no secrets left but his own regrets.

o0O0o

The found him wedged in a corner, head pillowed awkwardly on a coil of rope. "I think your uncle's looking for you."

"Yeah, probably."

"But you needed to be alone?" she asked. "I get it. It's so loud here. The forest was always so quiet. And Ba Sing Se's going to be worse."

"Yeah, I know." He gazed up at the moon, its light paling beside the ferry's lanterns.

"It's funny." She leaned against the wall. "My village can't really be that far from here. It seemed like it took forever to get here, but people have been passing through to on their way to Ba Sing Se forever. That's why it was conquered. The Dragon of the West wanted to camp his army there on the way to lay siege. He was only there two days, and that's the whole reason the Fire Nation wanted it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," she told him. "It's the Fire Nation's."

He looked away.

"The Fire Nation wasn't able to conquer Ba Sing Se, but they kept my village anyway." She swallowed. "We kept thinking they would leave, and we would be able to go back. We were only little kids. But they never did, so we started trying to fight them off. We built a real rebel camp out in the forest. We got pretty good at stealing provisions and disrupting supplies, but we weren't ever really able to make a dent, and everybody still in the village was still stuck with the Fire Nation army there. The Avatar and his friends passed through too."

Li jerked, his good eye wide. "What?"

"Yeah. I know right? I got to meet the Avatar." She rolled her eyes. "He was okay, but one of his friends, the waterbender, he told me we were never going to get rid of the Fire Nation with our little raids, tried to convince me I should use the reservoir to flood the whole town, just kill everybody. He tried to say that all the villagers left were collaborators and deserved it anyway, and that if I was a real rebel leader, I had to learn how to make the tough choices."

Li shuddered. "You didn't do it though, right? you didn't..."

"No!" she yelped. "No, of course I didn't, but he was right, we were never going to get the Fire Nation out doing what we were doing, so I thought, you know, maybe it's time to pack it up, worry about getting the kids we had with us somewhere safe."

"That's..." He looked away again, his scar softened by the shadows. "That's probably the best thing you could have done."

She shrugged. "I guess. Most of the group didn't come with us. They didn't want to stop fighting. But I took the youngest, the kids who were only babies when the Fire Nation came. We left them sleeping below deck. I have no idea what we're going ro do when we get to Ba Sing Se."

"Um..."

"I was going to ask you to help," she said in a rush. "But I did it all wrong. I was going to try to get you to join up us, and tell you about everything after you already said yes."

"Uh..." His eyes darted around like he couldn't find anything he could let them settle on. He looked everywhere except at her. "Let me think about it, okay?"

"You don't have to," she told him, feeling very stupid, and very much like she would like to find somewhere to sleep like The Duke and the rest of the kids.

"Look, talk to my uncle." He finally looked at her. "He... He usually knows what to do with things like this. He'll figure something out."

"Thanks," she said, at a loss for what else to say."

"Why did you even ask _me,_ anyway?" He had that lost look again, and Katara lifted her hand to soothe it away. But she didn't know how. Her and dropped back to her side.

He was hurting, she almost said. And the scar wasn't new. He got it when he was a kid, from a firebender. He'd seen the war, the real war, where people were hurt and changed, and he was trying to get away from it just like her. Maybe she thought he would be like her, that he would have to help, because he couldn't bring himself not to, because nobody else was going to do it. "I don't know," she said, instead of trying to explain it.

"My uncle will know what to do," he said again. "I promise."

o0O0o

The crush of people in the ferry station left Katara clutching at The Duke and Cherry Pit's hands tight. She held her elbows close over the handles of her kataras to keep them from being stolen. Thr forest had never made her feel this way, no matter how tall the trees, or dense the vegetation. It never made her feel small and crowded out, choked.

But even in the tumult, she could find Li and Mushi, sitting on a low padded bench underneath one of the station's glowing lamps. Li was slumped sulkily while his uncle hailed a tea seller.

"Hey Longshot, can you take care of these two for a minute? I want to talk to Mushi."

He gave her a look.

"I know it might help if he saw them, but I'd feel safer if you and Smellerbee kept the kids together."

Longshot took her their hands, and Katara wove her way through the crowd. As she drew closer, Mushi took a sip of his tea and recoiled. "Ugh, coldest tea in Ba Sing Se is more like it! What a disgrace!"

Li rolled his eyes and folded his arms, and Katara almost laughed.

But just before she was about to call out to them, Mushi brought his tea close to his face, and blew on it. Steam sprang up from it's surface. He smiled.

Katara's heart froze in her chest. Numbly, she turned around and ran, back to Longshot and Smellerbee. When she caught up to them, she didn't say a word. She just needed to get away.


End file.
